zompist bboard

[Cathbad]

In a conlang I'm nibbling on a bit at the moment (it's genetically related to High Eolic, if anyone's interested), there are several different possible ways of pluralizing nouns, depending (mostly) on the phonological shape of the noun root and (less) on its diachronic behavior. Here are some examples (phonetic details aren't all that important, just to get the feel of it all):

auč - auča
bog - boga
čap - čapa
kigèl - kigla
teris - tersa
seutèč - seuča
pèk - apka
ris - arsa
eyèrč - eyèrča
ausak - ausa
dayèk - dayè

At some point in the language, all open final syllables were closed by adding /k/. Subsequently, prosodic rules have allowed for open syllables to occur again, and words loaned after this stage (roughly 200 years ago, when the people speaking this language migrated around 800 kilometers to the south of their homeland) may exhibit word-final vowels. However, since no "native" way existed to pluralize these words effectively, another strategy was adopted, namely adding the clitic -lak, which normally functions at noun phrase level, in the following way...

Functioning of the clitic -lak

Nouns may freely take other nouns as modifiers:

kigèl - man
kigèl alam - hungry man

Normally, nouns (and their modifiers) are pluralized as outlined above:

kigla - men
alama - hungry [people]

Noun phrases, however, can only be made plural by adding the clitic -lak, with no plural marking on either of the constituents:

kigèl alam-lak - hungry men

(If you're interested, case marking occurs on the head noun, if at all; it's optional for honorifically non-salient entities anyway.)

This clitic was adopted for nouns like lausa to provide them with a stand-alone plural: lausa-lak. So effectively, nouns ending in a vowel now technically function as complex noun phrases, which may lead to interesting reanalyses in the future...

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What do you all think?
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High Eolic (PDF)

[roninbodhisattva]

THAT is really cool. Man, I really like that idea. What would be cool is if you had the case marking on the plural clitic as well, or even on both. You can say it developed from some kind of plural pronoun or something.

Or you know, just keep it the way it is.

[TaylorS]

That is very interesting! What's the diachronics of this plural system?
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Slayegmhyegn (Solaric)

[Cathbad]

Well, the protolang had two plural markers: /u.ezja/ and /sja/. These are thought to have functioned as 'definite plural' and 'indefinite plural', respectively, and both functioned as phrase-level clitics. Just before all final syllables became obligatorily closed in Aucenian, both were still used widely, in the guises of -oyla(k) and -(y)a, but with slightly different uses: -oyla(k) was used to mark any final plural nominal element, no matter whether it formed a noun phrase or not (this comes from the fact that the language had a word order system whereby topicalized entities (those most likely to be marked by a 'definite' suffix) were clustered towards the end of the sentence). In actual noun phrases, however, the final element was marked, while the medial ones were marked as well.

When the closed-final-syllable rule applied, it did not apply to noun phrases; that is, non-final elements of noun phrases did not "close" their final syllables. For most singular nouns, this was irrelevant, since the closing rule was generalized for standalone nouns as the "proper" form. But for plural nouns, this was very much relevant, because after the change happened and open final syllables were allowed again, plurals from non-final elements were generalized onto all other plurals in order to provide a more easily recognizable distinction between singular and plural. (-k thus effectively became a singular marker.) -olyak > -lak also became limited to final elements in noun phrases, and due to prosodic rules which ellided final vowels at word boundaries within noun phrases, the plural marker on non-final elements was lost, leading to the generalization that only the final element can be pluralized.
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High Eolic (PDF)